In 1915 Charlotte Brown, the principal of the Sidon Girls’ School, an American missionary school in Lebanon, described how the staff and students were living “dual lives” in “an isle of safety” in the midst of the “stress of great and terrible events” during the first year of World War I. Deliberately isolating the girls from the “suffering world outside,” the missionaries were initially thankful “that a few young lives were being spared the sorrow so pressing outside.” This was not to last, however. Within a year the protective shield the missionaries had erected around their charges was pierced. The wolves of starvation, disease, fuel shortages, locusts and increasing lawlessness were howling at the school’s door. On top of this, the uneasy neutrality of the American presence was shattered when the Ottoman government briefly closed down the mission schools in Sidon in 1916. By 1917, the school’s “connection with the needy became an intimate one,” and the school had been turned into a soup kitchen, refuge for the starving, and workshop to produce garments for the poor. In 1918, the school took in 165 orphans. Major sources for this paper are the detailed reports written by the missionaries who worked at the Sidon Girls School during the war years (quoted above). These reports provide rare, locally based primary accounts of daily life and suffering during the war in Sidon, and demonstrate how the missionaries living among the local community responded to its misery and tragedies with a great deal of empathy and ingenuity. Yet a certain remove that is discernable in the reports highlights how the Mission’s ambivalent position as a foreign institution affected its relief work. Despite its ostensibly non-political status and its assumed local “intimacy” with the community, the Mission’s ability to provide relief stemmed from the politics, power and privilege that derived from its foreign status. I argue that local experiences of war relief such as this complicate the larger, global history of humanitarian relief that tends to broadly situate it within the “civilizing mission” of colonialism, without examination of the confusion of categories on the ground. The story of Sidon Girls School demonstrates that who and what constituted local was often at the heart of the humanitarian response to World War I in the Middle East, and could determine who received aid, and thus survived.

World War I was a major turning point in the history of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces. This paper will focus on one locale, the city of Jerusalem, and will discuss the “politics of welfare” during the war years. Famine, locust, mobilization to the army and a deep financial crisis were only parts of the challenges that Jerusalemites experienced during the war. Jews, Muslims and Christians dealt with the crisis differently, both on the communal level and the inter-communal level. Communally, the Jewish community, led mainly by Zionist initiatives, enjoyed much communal support and help, whereas the Muslim and Christian communities were less active organizing their own communal support networks. However, external forces, such as the US (both with the aid provided by the American Colony, as well as the American consulate), provided vast support to all communities in the city and country. Inter-communally, some of the Ottoman-based organizations in Jerusalem, such as the Red Crescent Society, as well as the municipality, initiated some assistance to Jerusalemites, of all communities, while trying to bridge any national or religious boundaries between the inhabitants. Using a variety of sources from local newspapers, the American Colony collection and the American consular records, this paper will look at “the politics of welfare” and will analyzes the close connection between welfare, power, and political influence, demonstrated by the various support networks that operated in Jerusalem.

Although relief work conducted in Beirut and Lebanon during the famine of World War I has been well documented, most of the contemporary narrative literature dealing with the aid programs emphasized the humanitarian aspects of the operations and the wretchedness of those it supported, while taking the aid workers themselves for granted. From what little characterizations are provided, one would deduce that the aid work was the outward manifestation of the goodness of the hearts of these stalwart individuals or their sense of duty to their sworn professions as missionaries, doctors or community leaders. However, the more personal observations found in the diaries, memoirs and correspondence of the American and local Lebanese relief workers who served the populations during the famine tell a different story. From these sources, this paper argues that the widespread suffering and the often distasteful survival tactics that the relief workers encountered eventually altered the way that many of them viewed themselves, the famine and those struggling to survive within it. In order to shield themselves from the horrors of their work, many of these individuals developed hardened, detached or paternalistic attitudes towards the impoverished and starving recipients of their charity, whose very life and death at times turned on the decision of the relief workers. These coping strategies helped the relief workers to rationalize their roles and responsibilities during the crisis and to mitigate the depression and guilt that many of them suffered during the war. It is particularly instructive to examine the humanity of these humanitarians of the wartime period since their experiences provide rare and well documented personal evidence of the complexity of human reactions to the crisis and how these responses were psychologically and psychosocially manifested and represented. Such subjective interpretations of the famine period are among the most elusive and yet also among the most important elements of its lived experience, without which suffering in the famine is dehumanized, reduced to literary topos and sterile mathematics.

Whereas in the European capitals the supply of food was a great problem during WWI, in Greater Syria food supply was not only a problem, but it was the problem, culminating in the famine that struck Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Famine, Louise Tilly argues, is not the result of an unavailability of food. Instead, she asserts that people starve because they are unable to command food; meaning that people either lack the money or the socially and politically sanctioned right to receive food for free. In light of the impending famine in Beirut, we see the local agencies, in particular the city’s municipality struggle to resolve the food crisis through legislative and provisionary measures beginning in the winter of 1914. The success or failure of these measures were determined by (1) the willingness of police, gendarmerie, bakers and merchants to enforce and adhere to the statutes set by the municipality and the Ottoman governor, and (2) by the inclinations of the Ottoman military authorities to allow the purchase and transport of food. Based on the journalistic accounts in the local sections of newspapers, i.e. al-akhbar al-baladiyyat (or city news) or al-mahaliyyat (or domestic news) as well as published and unpublished personal narratives of the war, this paper argues that the municipal attempts to obtain, distribute, and legislate food supplies —although mostly marked by failure— illustrate the increasing significance of municipal politics, discernable in its pre-war role of its agencies in urban management of “cleanliness, social behavior, and public hygiene” and further strengthened during the war. I argue that the wartime actions of the municipality and its various agents epitomize the interference of a governing body into the fabric of daily life of the civilian that is characteristic of wartime societies in general. In that the municipality asserts its right and responsibility to determine when, what and how much an individual was allowed to eat. Furthermore, the response of the civilian population to actions of the municipality undulated between compliance and resistance motivated by the desire to survive. The result is a bilateral process of negotiation between the municipality and the civilian. The outcome of which often was that the makeshift creativity of the civilian in terms of stretching food or substituting ingredients were often adopted into the legislative measures of the municipality.